


Sweetwater

by Vana



Series: Original fiction [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 12:14:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3249293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana





	Sweetwater

The first time I saw her, she was chasing shadows and I was chasing the sunset on the horizon.

I was taking the scenic routes, moving from New York City back to Portland after four years on the East Coast. Me and my U-Haul needed a break, so I rode my ten-speed from the rest area on Highway 93 until it turned into the main street of Salmon, Idaho. 

I walked into a typical cowboy bar, playing country music that was a decade old and where the women all had hairdos recalling Texas in the 1960s. All except her — the woman who was sitting at a table by herself. Her hair was long and straight, and it covered her face partially as she sat by the window, looking blankly out at the quiet street where night had settled the dust. 

I did want to talk to her, but two things stopped me. The first was that I was leaving in the morning anyway and what was the purpose of meeting someone, really? 

The second reason was that I felt like even though she sat in public in this bar, I would be upending her privacy if I approached her. That kept me on my barstool talking to the bartender and the regulars. I finished two pints of the local ale and tried not to look at her when I left. The next morning I pulled out and hit the road for Oregon.

*

I played the flute and tin whistle, occasionally, with whatever band needed one. An old buddy asked me if I could come gig with his Irish band for a day at a fair outside Eugene. I would be miked and all I’d have to do was pipe some old Celtic standards and back up the singer. I packed my stuff and headed for the fair site, a little over two hours south of my new pad in Portland. 

After our set, the next band invited us to come up and jam. About ten of us were heavy into a long song when I choked on my own inhalation. The flute squeaked in surprise and I recovered, though shakily. 

She was there in the audience, facing us but not seeing us. I knew it was her — I recognized her gentle features from that night eight months ago in Salmon. Even though I was up on stage and she was in a crowd of a hundred on the grass, I felt like we — everyone that wasn’t there in her thoughts — were invisible. 

This time I wasn’t going to leave without saying something. As the stagehands were striking and with the smell of weed hanging heavy in the summer air, I walked up to her. She didn’t look too surprised. I like to think she recognized me.

“I remember you from Salmon,” I said. “You were in the bar on Main Street.”

She spoke back to me, and her voice was as smooth as rain, not eager, not self-conscious. 

“Yes,” she said. “I was watching for my family.”

*

I took her back to Portland. I don’t know where she lived or how she got there. She stayed with me for a little while and then she left. She never let me get close, but I think I was falling in love with her all the time. I couldn’t even decide if she was closer to eighteen or forty-eight. In certain lights, her face looked as lined as a grandmother’s; in others her eyes shone with the clarity of a much younger woman. The one thing I did know was the sadness of her hands. She let me hold them once, when she told me about her ancestors being forced out of their homes and into a world of violence and deep cold. My mind didn’t register the phrase “trail of tears” until after she had gone away. 

It was winter when she left me — no, just left, I tried to convince myself to say. This wasn’t about me. The woman had more history than I could understand. Still, I missed her every day, and especially when the rain beat the windows of my apartment. I thought of her looking out the window. 

* 

On a cold night I put on my wool scarf and my hat and walked down the four blocks to the pub where they knew me before I moved to New York and where I was once again a regular. “Whiskey,” I told the bartender, and almost before it was down on the table I had swallowed the whole thing. He looked at me with “Another?” in his eyes but I shook my head. “Fat Tire,” I said this time. The whiskey had warmed me from the inside. 

The pub always attracted a lot of different types of people. Three young guys were bullshitting at the bar, every other word “bro." A group of girls eyed them over weak Cosmos.

And a group of old Native men sat around a big table, with an unfinished card game scattered over the surface. I sipped my beer and listened to them tell the stories they’d told for hundreds of years – the world the way it was, the fish, the joyous dances, and the way they have to suffer now.

Someone came in that I thought I knew, but I didn’t see who it was before the door closed again against the hard wind and they were gone.

*

I saw her once more, in a dream. She was walking fast over a prairie, wearing brown leather and a skirt that blew back in the wind. I tried to go after her. She walked east as the sunset painted the sky with reds and purples behind her, and I couldn’t keep up. She walked over the top of a curve in the land and I lost sight of her. 

The next thing I saw was a wooden cross on the border of a steel sea. I knew she had gone then, not under the sand, but across the wide water, where she and her people had come from. I woke up trying to call her, but it was then that I realized I never knew her name.

 

\---

 

This is my narrator.


End file.
